Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in broken shells and the cursive of foam across basalt, each entry dissolving before the next wave can read what the last one meant.

I found your handwriting in the salt flats— wide vowels cracked open by sun, consonants scattered like driftwood too far from any river to name.

There is a language the ocean speaks only to things it is eroding: the cliff face, the glass float, the hull of a boat that forgot its harbor.

We were fluent once, standing knee-deep in the shallows, translating the water's argument with our bare and burning feet.

Now the tide turns its page again. I press my ear to the wet sand and hear nothing but the patience of salt, finding its way back to salt.